Duplicate Content- Best Practise Usage of the canonical url
-
Canonical urls stop self competition - from duplicate content. So instead of a 2 pages with a rank of 5 out of 10, it is one page with a rank of 7 out of 10.
However what disadvantages come from using canonical urls. For example am I excluding some products like green widet, blue widget.I have a customer with 2 e-commerce websites(selling different manufacturers of a type jewellery).
Both websites have massive duplicate content issues.
It is a hosted CMS system with very little SEO functionality, no plugins etc.The crawling report- comes back with 1000 of pages that are duplicates. It seems that almost every page on the website has a duplicate partner or more.
The problem starts in that they have 2 categorys for each product type, instead of one category for each product type.
A wholesale category and a small pack category.So I have considered using a canonical url or de-optimizing the small pack category as I believe it receives less traffic than the whole category.
On the original website I tried de- optimizing one of the pages that gets less traffic. I did this by changing the order of the meta title(keyword at the back, not front- by using small to start of with). I also removed content from the page. This helped a bit.
Or I was thinking about just using a canonical url on the page that gets less traffic.
However what are the implications of this? What happens if some one searches for "small packs" of the product- will this no longer be indexed as a page.The next problem I have is the other 1000s of pages that are showing as duplicates. These are all the different products within the categories. The CMS does not have a front office that allows for canonical urls to be inserted. Instead it would have to be done going into the html of the pages. This would take ages. Another issue is that these product pages are not actually duplicate, but I think it is because they have such little content- that the rodger(seo moz crawler, and probably googles one too) cant tell the difference.
Also even if I did use the canonical url - what happened if people searched for the product by attributes(the variations of each product type)- like blue widget, black widget, brown widget. Would these all be excluded from Googles index.
On the one hand I want to get rid of the duplicate content, but I also want to have these pages included in the search.Perhaps I am taking too idealistic approach- trying to optimize a website for too many keywords. Should I just focus on the category keywords, and forget about product variations.
Perhaps I look into Google Analytics, to determine the top landing pages, and which ones should be applied with a canonical.
Also this website(hosted CMS) seems to have more duplicate content issues than I have seen with other e-commerce sites that I have applied SEO MOZ to
On final related question. The first website has 2 landing pages- I think this is a techical issue. For example www.test.com and www.test.com/index.
I realise I should use a canonical url on the page that gets less traffic. How do I determine this? (or should I just use the SEO MOZ Page rank tool?)
-
1. Use the canonical tag. The assumption is that whatever rankings you may have garnered for the "small pack" version would now simply land on the other page. The duplicate content implications are far greater than the potential loss of some rankings.
2. Yes, use the canonical tag on the /index to point to just http://www.yoursite.com/
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Hi i have a few pages with duplicate content but we've added canonical urls to them, but i need help understanding what going on
hi google is seeing many of our pages and dupliates but they have canonical url on there https://www.hijabgem.com/index.php/maxi-shirt-dress.html has tags https://www.hijabgem.com/maxi-shirt-dress.html
On-Page Optimization | | hijabgem
has tagshttps://www.hijabgem.com/index.php/quickview/index/view/id/4693
has tags
my question is which page takes authority?and are they setup correct, can you have more than one link rel="canonical" on one page?0 -
Numerous duplicate destination URLs from within one menu - potential impact for on-page SEO?
Hello all What is your evaluation in regards to a number of links (different anchors) targeting the same destination URL from within one and the same menu (on the same website)? Keeping it brief: Think of a top menu drop down entry, that needs to feature the alphabet (each letter has it's own sub-entries). However, the actual letter itself is not represented by a page (it has no URL either). So far so good. However, when testing the menu on a mobile device, the letter entries are still treated, as if they were non-existent pages - thus throwing a 404 when clicked. In order to avoid people getting a 404 when clicking on any letter, it would be ideal, if they were directed to any main page (the same destination URL though). However, that would mean 26 times the same destination URL from within that menu. Is this approach potentially bad for SEO, hence there would be numerous duplicate destination URLs in place? Please mind, I am not inquiring for help on how to arrange the actual menu. I am concerned about the impact, identical destination URLs could have on the on-page SEO. Many thanks in advance for your help and input!
On-Page Optimization | | Hermski0 -
Correct .htaccess settings for canonical url?
I want to forward all urls to http:www.mysite.com but am a little confuse because I am getting duplicate content error: Pages with Duplicate Page Content as of Jan 15http://titanappliancerepair.com/ 1 duplicatehttp://titanappliancerepair.com 1 duplicatehttp://titanappliancerepair.com/index.html 1 duplicate*****************************************************************What should I put ion htaccess file so I can forwardhttp://titanappliancerepair.com/index.htmlhttp://titanappliancerepair.comhttp://titanappliancerepair.com/to http://www.titanappliancerepair.comor what is the correct way to do it?I'm confused because when I enter http://titanappliancerepair.com/ in browser it showshttp://titanappliancerepair.com so how can it be considered duplicate content?.Can someone help?I have godaddy and they have gave me this code to put RewriteEngine on
On-Page Optimization | | webbutler13
rewritecond %{http_host} ^coolexample.com [nc]
rewriterule ^(.)$ http://www.coolexample.com/$1 [r=301,nc]What is correct?0 -
How do I remove a Canonical URL Tag?
Some of my report cards say I have too many canonical URL tags. However, there is no information no how to delete one. Can someone give me a link or explain? Thanks.
On-Page Optimization | | dealblogger0 -
Which is Best Practice for creating URLs for subdomain?
My website is related to education. We have created sub domains for all major colleges, universities & Entrance exams like Gre, Toefl ETC. for eg: amityuniversity.abc.com (Amity is Name of University ) Now if have to mention city name in URL as well (college is located in multiple locations) amityuniversity-delhi.abc.com
On-Page Optimization | | rohanarora536
amityuniversitydelhi.abc.com Now my Q is can we use hyphens in sub domains if we have to add city name or shall we create without using any hyphens. In Directory structure we can always separate words with hyphens, can we follow same practice in subdomain as well Which is a best URL for subdomain amity-university-delhi.abc.com
amityuniversity-delhi.abc.com
or amityuniversitydelhi.abc.com0 -
Duplicate content because of content scrapping - please help
We manage brands websites in a very competitive industry that have thousands of affiliate links We see that more and more websites (mainly affiliates websites) are scrapping our brand websites content and it generate many duplicate content (but most of them link to us back with an affiliate link). Our brand websites still rank for any sentence in brackets you search in Google, Will this duplicate content hurt our brand websites ? If yes, should we take some preventive actions ? We are not able to add ongoing UGC or additional text to all our duplicate content and trying to stop those websites of stealing our content is like playing cat and mouse... Thanks for your advices
On-Page Optimization | | Tit0 -
Content placment best for SEO?
We currently have a scroll bar box at the bottom of our page with information in but from what I can see scroll bar boxes at the bottom of websites looking a little spammy (a lot of over optimized websites using them) would we be best in using a strategy like this site www.solopress.com/ which implement a show more link that drops information down would this be read as good information for Google or look just as spammy?
On-Page Optimization | | BobAnderson1 -
Keyword in URL
Hi everyone, I've heard many times that keyword prominence in url have a good impact for on-page optimization, even in SEOmoz it is one of the on-page factors. But what if i put keyword in URL then some of the page weight will be targeted to the page in the URL. Which in my vision makes only a negative impact. For ex. Targeted page <a>with keyword "buy car in NY" has a link with anchor text "buy car in NY" pointing on page **, so some weight from A will be transferred to B. Also I think this subject cover a cross linking, so I would like to know, what is the right way of doing cross linking and does it still brings any impact on keyword rankings in SERP.**</a> <a>**Good answer will be appreciated. Cheers, Russel**</a>
On-Page Optimization | | smokin_ace0